1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of knowledge management, and, more specifically, to a system and method for affinity review and approval.
2. Discussion of the Background
When a person is attempting to accomplish a task, it is often useful for the person to obtain information from other people who have knowledge of the topics with which the task is concerned. To do so, the person must have a way to discover the people who have the information the person is seeking to obtain. One way of facilitating this discovery is to publish people's “affinities,” which are simply links between people and categories or topics of information. Each affinity may include a value representing the strength of the relationship with the category—the higher the value, the greater the person's affinity for the topic.
It is possible that publishing a person's affinity (i.e., making the affinity known to others) would be inappropriate, either because the affinity is inaccurate or misleading, or because it reveals an accurate relationship with a topic that the person does not wish to make public. Therefore, it is important to provide ways for people to judge their proposed affinities accurately and to avoid affinity publication in such cases. Recognizing that policies concerning affinity publication may be affected by different cultures and laws, the solution to these problems must be flexible as well.